Viktor Frankl in the camps would see in his mind's eye a picture of his wife, and he would feel transported. In those moments he was free and untouched by evil.
This speaks also to who we were taught we were, in our families of origin. In our mind's eyes, in times of challenge...we see the abuser's perception of us at the time they were hurting us. Whatever the abuser believed about how they could justify hurting us ~ whatever the abuser believed that enabled trampling of personal boundaries that should have been sacrosanct ~ that is what we will believe about ourselves.
That is why we go role: competence. The decision to fight, and to win. That is what was destroyed in us at the hands of our abusers.
We are more courageous than the average bear, maybe. I think this is true.
Someone I can't remember now wrote that very few people understand just how much energy some of us devote to being normal. I would say all of us devote an incredible amount of energy to being normal. In that way? Those of us never especially normal are fortunate beings.
We go ~ what was it called, in Watership Down? Tharn? When the rabbit freezes from fear of the predator?
Some part of us, the traumatized part of us, knows how to deal with challenge. It is so easy for us to slip into role.
But every time we do, the freaking stupid abuser wins. The power of shame, the fiction of external locus of control, wins. Within us, the things we were taught about power and power over and where we fit ~ until we revisit those things we were taught by people caught in the grip of something they understood no more then than we understand it, now ~ until we revisit those traumatic places of breakage we carry, until we see ourselves being hurt through our own eyes and never again through the self-justification of some half-crazed abuser, we cannot achieve internal locus of control.
Everytime I think of that stepfather, Copa, I become so angry with him. Not even for the beating, which you survived, but for what he did not provide. For what he did not see, in the living wonder of that child that you were simply because you existed. That was the responsibility given him.
He failed Copa, so abysmally.
***
It is scary to be real when we have been hurt into self desertion, into self betrayal, to survive.
roar
Whatever. Here we still are.
Of his parents and his wife, only he survived. His wife may have, at that moment, been dead but he chose to see her. And for him, she lived. True or false, real or imagined, does not matter. But only the personal choice to triumph over circumstances, and oneself.
Yes, I agree, Copa. That is why Maya Angelou and the black lady from Matrix and Lisa Vanderpump (and my newest mom, Dr Ben Carson), can hold strong in the places I can not.
We are fortunate in that.
I think we could not heal, if we could not do that.
The thing is, those who abused us were wrong. Once we can see it, we cannot unsee it. However they justified what they did, the emotional charge of it is reclaimed for ourselves. The things that happened become nothing more than just what happened.
Without the energy charge that froze us in place, that made us go "tharn" when we were hurt, every time we were hurt, the memories are no longer traumatic.
But somehow, we cannot see it until we see it.
Then, we do.
Huh.
Or is it ourselves? Are we the one's who see? When I see myself chatting up the sales clerks, gleefully manipulating, to bring them a moment's pleasure or to myself, a moment of mastery, the sense that I can have some effect, when I leave my bed. That I still"work" as a person.
Yes.
I think the answer is very much Yes.
So, you are on a path that is a continuum, Copa. I am so proud and happy for you. I did not know you were aware that you were in role. You are flirting with real, Copa! Wow, that is so hard and scary
and you are seeing yourself do it.
We are doing like, excellent work here, everybody.
Wow.
Ha! Copa!
Brene Brown's concept of the arena will help here I think, Copa. And her concept of sitting with the feelings, of simply observing the feelings and the responses and how that all feels. And to do nothing but observe.
There is nothing you have to do, Copa. There is nothing you can do.
The feelings have nothing to do with what is happening. The feelings are overwhelming because everything gets lumped together under that category Mortality/mortal fear that overwhelmed the little girls, or the little boys, we were when we were hurt.
Standing in the face of it, that is courage.
You are progressing at the instantaneous speed of something faster than light.
So courageous, Copa.
Yay.
Good for you.
I am so happy.
Have nothing to fear; nothing to protect. Remember we used to say that, in FOO Chronicles?
I do not see this. I do not believe that the reality comes from knowing or seeing...at least by mortals. Every body distorts.
We do, Copa.
I think it might be a question of the nature of the distortion; of the color of the filter. Some of us are somehow okay with knowing there is no answer. They are steady; able to concentrate. They tend not to ~ I don't know. They feel like the eye of the storm. Like they walk around in the silence and peace and out of timeness at the eye of the storm.
Maybe, that is where we are going, too.
There are no answers, there.
It would have to do with balancing and knowing that.
Maybe, this is true.
Here is an interesting fact: Marijuana's effect has to do with messing with our senses of time. We see and know things that were always there but that we have taught ourselves to disregard.
Now, that's interesting.
One of these days, I am going to smoke marijuana, again.
Whatever you guys. I never said that.
:O)
And if it is another person, Cedar? Like a therapist. Or in your own case, you, with your sister. When you see her in her loonyness directing her grandchildren to display their precociousness to feel power herself.
Okay, so in this one, Copa, what I see really is sadness in my sister ~ a desperate attempt to require that she be seen by sucking the air out of the room so she cannot again be excluded. No one can shut down a child. In that sense, my sister's reward was attention to her children that she needed when she was a little girl. That is how I see now, Copa. That is what I mean when I say once we see, we cannot not see.
And there is compassion.
Huh.
The therapist.
I don't know what to say about that.
But what happened is now just a thing that happened. The shame in it, the forever emotional horror of it, is gone. For the levels I have explored and come through here, it is not a vital, virulent thing requiring a role to survive the shame in it.
Thank you, Copa.
And Serenity, if somehow, you are reading with us.
And Recovering Enabler, for the beginning.
:O)
I am thinking of D H here. Who says NO just because.
Exactly.
It was an amazing thing to listen to him talking to the electrician this morning. Or, to watch him see what is.
That is internal locus of control.
I am very curious about this.
I said something to that effect to D H this morning.
For heaven's sake.
I think he gets me, though.
Like M, Copa. That kind of honest "let it be what it is". I think that is where we are going.
The most powerful part of the sentence are the words that are left unspoken.
The most powerful person in the family is the one not there. Perhaps banished or shunned.
I had not thought of it like this, Copa.
You are correct.
Very much so.
Huh.
Words and images that are there...are but guideposts to reveal what is not.
Yes.
And there is a quote about that. But I am trying to hurry this morning, so I can put everything in order for tomorrow.
From this way of being there is less shame. Less guilt. Less judgment. Me? I judge. In the case of Nono. I just feel mad. We have always paid him well for any work he has done for us. We offered for him to stay here without cost when he separated from his wife. He did. I judge.
Maybe Nono feels shame. But why reject M?
I somehow veered off topic. But somehow it feels like it relates.
D H would never see these events as rejection of him, anymore than M does. I think the difference is that they are not trying to forever figure out who they needed to be to keep the person in their circle. For M, and for D H too,
they
are the heart of the circle. We are forever trying to figure out how we went wrong. This mindset is an artifact of abuse.
I think.
I think it has to do with what we learned in the eyes of the abuser.
In how they saw us in order to do the very wrong things they did.
We believed them.
That is the core of the shame issue.
That we believed them.
They lied.
Remember when I went through that thing about who was the liar here, me or my abuser?
It was the abuser.
That was the liar.
But to admit it felt like a dangerous betrayal.
It's all so complex, except it isn't.
I am thinking now of a master of ceremonies at a circus with silver hair and white tux and his whip. And his schtick? The power of No.
NO and NO and NO and NO.. And from all of those not otherwise specified emerges a grand chaos, initially, and finally, the coherence of a new kind of truth.
Like in The Wizard of Oz.
Or the mystic writings at the heart of every religious or philosophical belief system.
***
"I am awake."
"So you believe."
Enter Pema Chodron.
Or, my mom Dr. Ben Carson.
:O)
I really will be offline for some time now.
You guys are entirely too fascinating.
Cedar
